Page 49 - City of Westlake FY20 Budget

Section 1 Executive
Board members of the
Westlake Historical
Preservation Society
researched eight
significant locations
recently nominated for
historical markers. The
Town Council
unanimously approved a
historical marker master
plan at the June 13th,
2011 meeting which
identified the sites and
place markers.
The sites are in the heart
of Westlake and on highly
traveled roads. Instead of
going through the State to
receive the designated
plaques, the Town will
take on the project. The
Texas Historical Marker
application process
requires exhaustive
research and
documentation for
potential sites and can
take up two to three years.
Community Profile
HISTORICAL MARKERS IN WESTLAKE
Westlake is also on a journey toward its own destiny that will be
unlike any other of the towns around it – better, richer because
Westlake will take into account its past in charting its future.
The folk of yesterday are gone and so is most of the evidence
proving they were here. They are remembered only as long as
there are rememberers. When even memories are gone, there is
precious little – an old house here or there, small cemeteries with
headstones askew, historical plaques, old-timey things in
museums, photographs, bits of poetry, recipes and old letters
with the musty smell of time, documents from court house
records, words trapped in newspapers, magazines or books.
WESTLAKE AND THE CROSS TIMBERS
This marker stands next to the loop
parking lot in front of the Westlake
Academy on JT Ottinger Road.
Our history begins in a distinctively
unique geographic region of North
Central Texas, the Cross Timbers. Early
explorers and travelers noticed the
area because of the extended
groves of oak trees bordered with
stretches of open prairie. As early as
1832, Washington Irving described it in a Tour of the Prairies: "I shall
not easily forget the mortal toil, and the vexations of flesh and spirit,
that we undertook occasionally, in our wanderings through the
Cross Timber. It was like struggling through forests of cast iron."
The Cross Timbers region extends across
parts of Kansas, Oklahoma, and Texas.
From a map, it may be seen that the
region runs in irregular vertical lines, a
little like icing running down the sides of
a cake. Benjamin Tharp writings
described the area as timbered islands
amid lakes of grass called oak
savannas, a name that refers to
wooded areas broken by stretches of
grasslands. Hence, describing our home
Westlake, Texas."
The rock chimney from the original Buck King homestead still
standing at Pearson Lane and Aspen Lane.
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